RB433

RB433AH

RB433UL

The Routerboard rb433ul ist currently not supportet.
This Board has 64MB RAM and the serial console is not supportet by uboot.
There are two Resets.
Reset 1 (Button) and Reset 2 (Pad).
Reset 1 is to reset the RouterOS and for force the netinstall (PXE).
Reset 2 is to choice the backup uboot.
Some times you must press both.

RB433UAH

UAH is the same board as AH, but with USB-connectors and dc/dc for 5V USB assembled.
Adding unpowered USB to other boards could be easy, just solder in connector or simply wires.

MicroSD Slot

The MicroSD Slot needs SPI-Bus sharing support, which is not implemented in Backfire.

SPI-Bus sharing has been implemented in Trunk r22862 the MicroSD Slot is usable now.
Read speed ist about 0.92 MB/s (11/13/10: I get I/O and -89 errors on the SPI bus while assessing the microSD card).

Installation overview

Here are the three main steps of the installation:

Boot the board on OpenWrt from the network (netboot): DHCP and TFTP servers required on the host.

Install OpenWrt to the internal flash with wget2nand: HTTP or FTP server required on the host.

Reboot on the new installation, configure, etc.

Netboot

The bootloader of RB433 is able to load an image in elf format via BOOTP into RAM and execute it.

Build the Target

You need to get OpenWrt trunk. In menuconfig choose:

Target System: Atheros AR7xxx/AR9xxx

Subtarget: Devices with NAND flash (mostly Mikrotik)

Target Images: ramdisk (and also tar.gz if you plan to do a permanent install with the same image)

Now build the ram disk version. While it's building create the tftp-root directory if not already done and a symlink to the ram disk image

Permanent Installation

You need a working netboot first, see above. Please note also that you cannot reflash from a previous OpenWrt installation, you need the netboot in any case.

Target Image

If you want to use the same trunk image as the netboot image (cf. above), you need to have the tar.gz target selected in the Target Images menu and rebuild if you didn't select it before. You can also use one of the pre-built images (tested with 12.09-rc2); in the download area, browse the ar71xx/nand/ directory and pick the two following files:

openwrt-ar71xx-nand-rootfs.tar.gz

openwrt-ar71xx-nand-vmlinux-lzma.elf

If you don't have many devices to install and your netbooted system can access the Internet, you can probably pass the download URL directly to wget2nand as well, that will save you the web server configuration step (see below).

Save your RouterOS license key

If you have access to the MikroTik's Winbox software, you can export the license file from System→Licence, as stated on the RouterBoard 411 page.

Otherwise, boot RouterOS and export the key to a file:

/system license output

Then list the files on your device to see which file the .key file was saved:

/file print

On a fresh install, the key file should be #1 (or #0 on a RB433UAH); to open the editor with file #1, type:

/file edit 1 value-name=contents

Then copy-paste the text in a file on your computer. The differences between the obtained key file and a key exported with Winbox are that the SoftwareID line is not present in the latter, and there are no empty lines, so you should probably delete all the empty lines in your file prior to import it for a new installation; the SoftwareID line should not bother the installer (untested).

Erase the NAND Flash

If you want to install OpenWrt permanently into the NAND flash you once need to erase the NAND flash to get rid of the RouterOS stuff:

connect via serial line

press a key shortly after powering the RB433 up

press e and type yes to format the flash from the bootloader

Setup the Host

An HTTP web server is required on the host, e.g. mini-httpd in Ubuntu. Install the mini-httpd web server

sudo apt-get install mini-httpd

In /etc/default/mini-httpd change

Start daemon

START=1

In /etc/mini-httpd.conf change

On which host mini_httpd should bind

host=192.168.6.1

Run in chroot mode

chroot

Where are the web files stored

data_dir=/home/openwrt/rb433uah/bin/ar71xx/

Restart the mini-httpd web server

sudo /etc/init.d/mini-httpd restart

Install OpenWrt into Flash

Start netboot (see above).

Press ENTER to get a shell prompt.

Execute:

wget2nand http://192.168.6.1

This script will set an IP address via dhcp on br-lan.
The output should look like: